“Starla?” Robin calls out. “Where are you?”
Starla peeks over the nose of a jetcopter to see Robin and Melanie. They look unharmed. She comes out of hiding and waves to them. “Hi.”
Once she’s closer, Starla realizes she’s an inch or two shorter than Robin now and probably a half-foot shorter than Melanie. Her cheeks turn red as she thinks of how she must appear to them. Then she remembers what Billy said to her, how he liked her better this way. She has liked herself better this way too, but there seems no choice but to try to change herself back now.
“Jesus,” Robin says. “What did they do to you?”
“They?”
“Storm and his cronies.”
“They didn’t do anything.” Starla tells them about the formula the computer in the Crystal Lair cooked up for her. “It started to work as I flew home. I crashed under a bridge and a nice woman named Greta found me.”
“Was it somewhere over Lake Ontario where it started to work?”
“Maybe. I can’t say for sure.”
“That explains why the homing beacon failed,” Robin says.
“What homing beacon?”
“Never mind. So you did this to yourself without consulting anyone else on the team? You know how worried we were about you?”
It’s funny to hear this from Robin, the lone wolf of the Super Squad. Or at least she had been the lone wolf as a man. Now that she has Melanie, they’re more like a separate pack of wolves. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“That’s pretty fucking obvious.”
“It wasn’t her fault,” Melanie says. “They drove her to it. That’s why they went after Dalton’s convoy.”
Robin rubs her chin and then nods. “Seems a little too subtle for Storm. He’s always been more into shock-and-awe than cloak-and-dagger.”
“You’re saying they killed all those people to make me feel guilty?”
“Why not? You were the strongest. Makes sense to knock you out first. Then while we were scrambling to pick up the slack, they brought those assholes in.”
“That’s horrible,” Starla says. Tears come to her eyes as she thinks of all those families suffering just to get under her skin. “But how could they know I’d be able to do this?”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they thought you’d fly off into space to sulk or lock yourself up in that ice palace of yours. I guess you gave them one better.”
“Rob, stop it. Can’t you see how hurt she is already?”
“Yeah, she’s a real fucking martyr. I suppose now you want to go find a way to fix this.”
“Yes. I need to get back to the Crystal Lair. I thought you’d have something that could get me up there.”
“About all I had was the jet and it got shot down.” Robin looks around the hangar. “Doesn’t look like most of these are going anywhere for a while. That stupid son of a bitch. What good did he think tearing apart the circuit boards would do?”
“Maybe he was trying to hotwire them,” Melanie suggests.
“Idiot. It’ll take me weeks to get all this put together again. Provided we can get rid of these bastards.”
Starla looks around at the mess the male Midnight Spectre made. “There’s really nothing here that will work?”
“There might be one thing. It’s kind of dicey.”
“What is it?”
Robin leads her over to a storage cabinet. Inside is what looks like the prop of a 1930s Flash Gordon serial. It’s roughly shaped like a backpack, except running down the middle is a rocket engine. “Is that a jetpack?”
“Yeah. It was the last thing Zeke made for me. It can fly, but it doesn’t do well around corners, which is sort of a problem in a city. Up in an arctic wasteland it shouldn’t be as much of a problem.”
Starla stares at the thing. She can already see herself spiraling out of control into the side of a glacier, ending up as not even a smear on the ice. “I’m not sure about this.”
“Did that stuff your daddy gave you suck out all your courage too? Or were you only brave because you had a bunch of nifty powers?”
She tries to slap Robin, but the other girl is too quick for her. She grabs Starla’s wrist in midair. Robin holds it in place and grins. “That’s more like it. Before you take off, I think you’ll want to get into something warmer. Not many sock hops up in the arctic.”
Starla’s face turns warm again as Robin lets her wrist go. She runs her sore wrist along her clothes. “Greta gave these to me. They belonged to her sister.”
“I think they’re cool,” Melanie says. “You think I could borrow them sometime?”
“Sure. They probably won’t fit when I get back.”
“You girls can discuss fashion upstairs while I try to get this thing working,” Robin says with a sneer.
Starla lets Melanie lead her upstairs. They go to one of the many bedrooms, though from the female clothes Melanie tosses onto the floor this must be Robin’s. “Don’t let her get to you,” Melanie says while she searches the closet. “She hasn’t slept much lately.”
“I’m used to it,” Starla says. Even before she became a girl Robin was always the combative one, the one who liked to stir the pot and poke the bear. The worst part is to think how often her snarky observations were on the money. How many times had Midnight Spectre warned them the government might turn on them? And now that’s exactly what had happened.
Melanie tosses a bright pink parka and accompanying snow pants on the bed. “Jasper bought her that for our ski trip in Switzerland. I’m sure you know how she took that.”
Starla notes the price tags still hanging off the clothes. “Pink isn’t really her color.”
“Well, don’t tell her, but I think she looks cute in it. It offsets those laser beam eyes of hers.”
They share a giggle at this. Starla removes the price tags and then begins to slip into the snowsuit. Pink isn’t her favorite color either, but she supposes when she crashes in the arctic the search party will have an easier time finding her corpse. After she buttons up the jacket, Melanie tosses a knit hat to her. “I like your hair shorter like that,” Melanie says.
“You do?”
“I might get mine cut like that.”
“I know someone who does good work,” Starla says. She doesn’t mind this inane chatter; it helps her keep her mind off what’s ahead of her. Melanie probably feels the same way.
They return downstairs to find Robin making some final adjustments to the jetpack. She looks up at them with a look of revulsion. “Good riddance to that,” she says.
“You could have at least tried it on. It really hurt Jasper’s feelings.”
Robin rolls her eyes. It always amuses Starla how like an old married couple these teenagers already are. If ever two people were made for each other, it’s Robin and Melanie. “Let’s hurry this up before I burn out my retinas looking at that thing.” She picks up a helmet to toss to Starla. The helmet—designed for the male Midnight Spectre’s larger cranium—fits over her head with the knit cap underneath.
Robin shows her the controls to the jetpack. They aren’t really hard to master. There are only two: the accelerator and the brake. “Provided the thing doesn’t blow up the second you turn it on, you’ll want to go easy on the throttle once you get to a comfortable cruising altitude. Try not to get much over five thousand feet or you aren’t going to be able to breathe. I’d give you an oxygen mask, but oxygen next to a volatile heat source isn’t a great idea.”
“I understand.” Though she knows Robin will roll her eyes again, Starla hugs her. “Thank you so much for your help. I know I don’t deserve it.”
“Damned right you don’t.”
Starla turns to Melanie. “Thank you too. Keep Robin out of trouble.”
“I’ll do my best.”
As expected, Robin rolls her eyes. “Provided you get back to normal, meet us in DC. Mel and I are going to pay Storm a little visit.”
“I’ll see you there. I hope.�
��
The teenagers retreat to a safe distance as the roof to the bunker opens up. The weight of the jetpack nearly doubles Starla over; that weight wouldn’t be so bad for the male Midnight Spectre with his hundred eighty pounds of toned muscle. “Here goes,” Starla mutters.
She hits the accelerator button. There’s only a rumble at first. Then her legs turn warm as the exhaust from the rocket engine washes over them. Before she knows what’s happening, Starla is catapulted into the air. She screams out of a mixture of terror and delight to be back among the clouds. A compass in the display of her helmet points to the north. Starla steers that direction.
***
Colonel Storm looks over the satellite photos and then pounds his fist on the table. “What the hell is going on?” he roars.
“Trouble, sir?” Major Hall asks from the doorway.
“The trouble is your goddamned science projects are going haywire. We got reports of Apex Man tearing up a carnival in Atomic City. Now there’s some brouhaha going on in the Aegean Sea with your boy Lord Neptune at the head of it. God only knows what Midnight Spectre and Velocity Man are up to.”
“If you remember the reports, sir, this was always a possibility. This is why the project was deactivated years ago.”
“And if I remember, you said those glitches had been fixed.”
“We thought they had been addressed.”
“Well I guess your damned eggheads thought wrong, didn’t they?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t suppose those things got an off switch, do they?”
“No, but we know their weaknesses. And we have the formula obtained by Apex Man. If we can round them up, it should be easy enough to deliver.”
“Fantastic. How do we go about rounding up four superheroes?”
“You don’t,” a voice hisses in Storm’s ear. He turns in his wheelchair to see that psychotic freak Midnight Spectre at his side. There’s no point asking how the man got in here; he practically built the security system—or at least the real one did and this one is supposed to have all that knowledge.
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Taking the plan to the next phase,” a familiar voice says. Storm turns in time to see his aide dissolve before his very eyes. In his place is Storm’s previous aide, that nutty bitch Carrie Dalton.
Dalton grins at him. She holds up a silver disc. “Pretty nifty device, don’t you think?”
“What did you do to the real Major Hall?”
“He got vaporized in that little fiasco outside town a few weeks ago.”
Storm shakes his head. The old switcheroo. He shouldn’t be surprised a traitorous snake like Dalton would come up with that. “Was that you in prison for the last year or him?”
“The first couple weeks it was me. Then a friend woke me up. Cleared away Roboto’s brainwashing and helped me see all that’s possible.”
“What about that attack on Focal City?”
“That was someone else wearing one of these gizmos. A little misdirection to keep those Super Bitches from thinking I was here. Not that I had to worry after you helped me take care of them.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“I’m sure you think you’re cleverly trying to stall for help to get here, but my friend has already disabled all of the security in this room. There’s no one coming to get you.” Dalton bends down to look Storm in the eye. “The best part of this whole plan was getting to see the look on your face when you realized how easily you’d been manipulated. We had you dancing to our tune like a goddamned puppet.”
“So now what are you going to do? Kill me?”
“Oh no, I have something much better in mind.” Dalton takes from behind her back what looks like a miniature pink hairdryer. “My friend—the one who broke me out of prison—did a little work on Dr. Roboto’s weapon. The one used on the original Super Squad. He made it a lot more portable.”
Storm doesn’t have any chance to escape, not confined to this wheelchair since that attack, the one Dalton staged. A beam of pink light hits him in the chest. He screams as his entire body begins to compact. At least most of it compacts; his stomach and breasts swell in time with each other.
By the time the pain is over, Storm is on the verge of passing out. A hand yanks his head back by the hair; the sharp pain prompts his eyes to open. Dalton leans down to hold up a mirror. In it Storm sees the face of a plump young woman with long brown hair. Her pudgy cheeks turn bright red as he realizes this is his face now. “You goddamned nutjob! You can’t get away with this!”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, we have a whole new life planned for you.” Dalton gestures to Midnight Spectre, who opens a briefcase. Inside is a light blue button down shirt with Air Force insignia on it. On the breast pocket is the name “Sturm.”
“What the hell is this?”
“Your new life.”
“I’m not—” Storm’s voice cuts off as he’s blinded by a series of dancing lights.
He hears Dalton’s voice coo, “From now on your name is Airman Maxine Sturm. You’re a radar operator stationed in Greenland. You’re a very docile, jolly young woman. Your favorite hobbies are reading trashy romance novels and eating chocolate. You’re going to sleep now. When you wake up, you’ll be nice and safe in your bed on the base. You won’t remember any of this. It’s all a crazy dream. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Maxine Sturm squeaks.
“Now, go to sleep.”
Maxine wants to stay awake, but she can’t. Her head sags on her chest. She wakes up with a start. She looks around the barracks and puts a hand to her sweaty hair. What a crazy dream, she thinks. She tries to remember what exactly it was about, but it’s already fading. She checks the clock by her bed; she has radar duty in three hours. She better get some sleep before then.
Maxine rolls over and goes back to sleep.
Chapter 25
The dank smell of mold mixed with the scent of laundry soap tells Allison where she is before she opens her eyes. They’re in the basement of their apartment building, where some of the old timers still go to wash their clothes by hand in the old sink. She opens her eyes to find herself tied to a chair, her back to Sally, who’s already awake.
“What did you think you were doing?” Alan Bass growls at Sally. “Did you think I’d let you leave me for this child? You think I’d let you break up our family?”
“You’re not my husband, you goddamned psychopath!”
Alan grabs Allison by the hair and yanks her head back. “And she’s your husband? This pubescent girl?”
“She was my husband. You stole her away from me.”
Allison takes this in with a sense of detachment. Something isn’t right. It takes her a moment to realize what’s wrong: her asthma. By all rights she should be turning blue right now, her chest as tight as if an elephant were sitting on it. But there’s nothing. Admittedly her breathing is a little faster from this excitement, but she has no trouble getting air into her lungs. She’s cured.
The formula worked! The question now is whether it had the same side effect as before. There’s no way to try superspeed while she’s tied up. She can try to accelerate her molecules the way she used to when some crooks would tie her up. She doesn’t want to try it though while he’s looking right at her.
Sally inadvertently helps her out. “Leave her alone! Haven’t you sons of bitches done enough to her?”
Alan turns away from Allison. He stomps over to Sally. This allows Allison to work on her bonds. She closes her eyes. For the last decade or so that she has been Velocity Man and then Velocity Gal, accelerating her molecules came to be automatic. She could do it as easily and routinely as someone brushing his teeth. To do it now requires more focus. This body hasn’t done it before.
“All I want is for us to be together, like we used to. Why won’t you let me?” Alan says.
“I keep telling you: you’re not my husband.”
“I
am your husband! I love you and Jenny more than anything in this world. Things can be like they were if you give me a chance.”
Allison can’t see it, but she hears Sally spit at him. She knows what Alan’s response will be to that. She takes a deep breath, willing herself to break through the ropes. Her eyes are still closed when she feels the ropes break away.
She zips around the chair enough to grab Alan’s wrist. “Leave my wife alone,” she hisses.
His eyes widen a moment before she delivers a series of superspeed punches to his midsection. He tumbles across the room from the impacts. Allison turns to smile at Sally. “Hold on. I’ll get you out of there.”
Now that she has done it once, it’s easier to repeat the feat to break Sally’s bonds. She’s about finished when Sally screams, “Look out!”
Allison ducks, allowing Alan to fly over her. As he lands, she greets him with a kick. He’s quick to recover from that. In all her career, Allison has never fought anyone at superspeed before. The world around her and Alan seems to be going in slow motion while they move at normal time, like The Matrix and all those other movies. In reality she knows to Sally they’re practically invisible.
It soon becomes clear that Allison is at a disadvantage. She has superspeed now, but so does he. The formula hasn’t made her any older or stronger, so that she’s still a scrawny teenager while he’s a grown man. When he drives the palm of his hand into her breastbone, she flies across the basement. Only her martial arts training with Robin allows her to land in a roll that brings her to the foot of the stairs.
Allison runs up the stairs to draw him away from Sally. She goes up one flight after another until she’s on the roof. Once there she realizes her mistake. Like a dumb kid in a horror movie she has left herself with nowhere to go. She’s trapped!
Alan appears in the doorway. “That was really clever, you little bitch, but it’s not going to matter. I’m through playing nice. After I snap you like a twig, I’m going to show Sally what’s left of you. Then she’ll finally see there’s no choice.”
Girl Power Omnibus (Gender Swap Superhero Fiction) Page 40
